Post Cards from La Bourboule – Lazing on a sunny afternoon ….

While the nights have been quite cold, we have had a few rather hot days here.  I am not at my best in hot weather, but grow lazy and sluggish and tend to doze a lot.  At home I spend such days, if unencumbered by the demands of work, next to the pond in a deckchair, the fountain playing, the frogs on mossy rocks around the pond, and probably surrounded by the remains of a large water melon (me, not the frogs).  And for some strange reason, and against type, I read cheap plantation novels on those occasions.

Not the sort that feature palatial mansions populated by dashingly handsome plantation owners and southern belles with innocent minds and heaving bosoms.  No, the sort I read are set in a grimly grimy Alabama, where ignorant uncouth white slave owners lead unglamorous lives in rustic settings, trying to augment the meagre harvests from their clapped out fields by selling their excess slaves.  What makes me read those books (I have four, picked up accidentally with a box of vampire novels) when close to a heat stroke completely eludes me.  Perhaps it is the relentlessly emphasized heat, or the undemanding nature of the books.  I read them half a page at a time, then doze a little, then flick through a few pages, then read a few more sentences.  I don’t know any other books I could read that way.  Or perhaps I read them for the smug feeling of moral superiority for not being a slave owner they induce in me.  It might even be a symptom of impending heat stroke.

But I digress, it must be the heat.  In La Bourboule, needless to say, there are no cheap plantation novels.  None in English, anyway.  So I spent the afternoon resting on my bed, minus the pond, the frogs, the water melon, and the haphazard reading.  I just doze.  Outside my window is the Dordogne, a small rushing creek which hurries noisily across its rocky bed.  A few birds sing, a bell chimes three times, I wake with a start – too late for lunch!  I turn over and go back to sleep.  Who needs lunch when there is ice cream in the freezer compartment.  They’ll miss me at Les Galapagos, but they will understand.  No one remonstrates with curistes who sleep all the time, because it is generally assumed that the Cure is terribly exhausting.  Actually it is not that bad, the heat is much worse for me, but I am not going to destroy a myth that caters to my vices.

At six o’clock I wake again, this time by a cold gust through the window.  The day’s heat battles with the night’s chill, and six o’clock has gotten caught in the middle.  I am not sure how I feel about this, I enjoyed dozing away the day, but now I am wide awake and suddenly remember that I had better get the house cleaned up before the weekend.  Sniff.  Hic transit gloria mundi.